RELAY || Virtual Reality AU

6

True to his expectations, the boy wandered in the same general direction as Toshinori as they made their way back into the well-lit streets of the health centre. He peeled off earlier, heading to some other department, but that wasn't unexpected either. There weren't all that many people in the same part of the complex as his former mentor, and they tended to get very few visitors at all. In all the years that he had been visiting, Toshinori had only ever run into a handful of relatives.

And then I went and turned into one of those absent visitors too, after thinking such shame on them myself, he thought with disgust, feeling the guilt bite deep as he checked in.

Shimura Nana was an old woman gone first to seed, then shrunken by age and inactivity. She had once towered over...well, towered over most people, even if she'd always looked short by comparison with Toshinori himself.

Now she was small and frail, curled into an armchair with a dreamy, distant expression on her face as she watched the window. It was playing footage from a seaside, with faint sounds of the beachgoers just audible from the speakers under the sill. The weather was good in the Interface—wasn't it always?—and the shoreline well occupied by visitors.

Toshinori couldn't help but feel a twinge of impatience—so much for an early visit, after all. What time was it? By now people would be expecting to see him somewhere in the Interface on his rounds.

"What are you doing here, you daft old thing?" Nana asked, not looking away from the seaside view. "I thought you'd be in there, rustling up troublemakers." She gestured at the window, her hand shaking with the exertion of lifting it. "Takes up a lot of time being the world's best, doesn't it?"

Toshnori cleared his throat. "I know it's been too long since my last visit," he said. "I meant to come sooner, but—"

She laughed at that, her voice thin and reedy, but turned to face him fully at last. "You think I didn't mean it when I told you to stop coming out here?" she asked. "You have important work to do. I wasn't needing or expecting company, you know. I get on just fine by myself these days. There's a few of us old seniles, we have fun together."

She paused, and shook her head. "No, I didn't expect you back here without news, so tell me. How goes your search?"

"It..."

Toshinori sagged, and dropped into one of the chairs opposite her, letting his arms drape across his knees. "I came to ask for your help, in all honesty."

Nana sighed, slow and wheezy. "Lad, my days helping anyone are done. I got the shakes so bad I can't stand, and I'm addled— addled! Not half so bad as they all think I am, but I'm not fooling around. There's holes , Toshi. Gaps which shouldn't be there. He did me in good, and terminating my account was just the start. These days I have to look twice just to see reality, and not the shades in my brain." She frowned at him. "Know how I know you're real?"

Toshinori shook his head, not daring to say a word.

"Because you're a man, Toshi, not some boy barely grown into his arms and legs. That kid visits me all the time. Keeps me company remembering the old days."

She sighed, pursing her lips a moment. "And maybe those old days were real, and maybe some of them only happened in my sleep, and I never can tell the which of them these days. Maybe you're just a kind soul humouring an old woman's delusion about a life of heroism and great destinies. The nurses all say so, anyway."

She leant back into her chair, looking out across the Interface screen once more. "I don't know what kind of help you're looking to find, Toshi, but it's not here. Not anymore."

***

He stayed a while longer. It would have been cruel not to, and anyway, hadn't the doctors been harping on at him for months to take a break from Hero work now and then?

Besides, she'd been his mentor. His guide through adjusting to the sudden swerve in his destiny, and he owed her too much not to repay her with company, no matter what she said about not needing his visits.

It was hard though, talking to her and realising, more and more, the legacy of her fight with All For One. She'd been robbed of so much, and she'd only been...

Well, it was too young. Too little time under open skies, with the fresh air across her face, even if it was only an illusion. And now even her memories were being stolen and warped by time and trauma.

She'd been whittled from the strongest person Toshinori had ever known into a frail old shell. Lined with wrinkles and left to rot in an old, worn-out armchair. Worse even than that, only a handful of people even knew who she was , and what she'd done in her life. The nurses who tended to her had believed her senile and deluded about her past career as a Hero for so long that she'd started to believe them herself.

"It was real," Toshinori found himself telling her, more than once. "It happened, I promise you. I wish it hadn't, but it did. And I'll find a way to stop it happening again."

She needed to hear it, even if he had no idea how he was ever going to keep a promise like that. At least someone ought to have hope.